At its fundamental core, democracy requires as a precondition a healthy measure of pluralism — an underlying society with a wide distribution of money and power. Although they are nicely symbiotic, democracy and a market economy are not the same, and democracy is certainly not identical to prosperity. America’s attachment to a market economy is relatively robust and its prosperity secure … as long as we can maintain our culture of challenge and innovation.
The threat is that we may find ourselves living in a market economy where a tiny fraction of the people and a small number of institutions reap virtually all of the rewards and make all of the social and economic policy decisions, presumably with a bias toward serving their own interests. This would be a democracy in name only. True democracy is surely not the most natural form of government for human beings, and perhaps it is only barely compatible with human nature, but it may well be mankind’s greatest invention. And the growing degree of concentration of wealth and power in our country today threatens its continuation. If our pluralism erodes, with it will vanish America’s brightest gem.
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